Matthew Arnold, a Life

Matthew Arnold was a man who valued his privacy so much that he often wrote and acted as if his well-known persona of pessimism were a wall behind which he could safely contemplate society. Thus, it may not be overly surprising that until recently the only competent biography of Arnold was by Lionel Trilling. In his preface to MATTHEW ARNOLD, Trilling bluntly states that he is more interested in the growth of Arnold the ideologist rather than Arnold the man. In 1981, Park Honan came along to provide a much needed corrective with his MATTHEW ARNOLD: A LIFE. This latter work is a massive yet highly readable text made possible only because Honan had access to numerous sources denied to Trilling. What emerges to the patient reader is a glimpse of the accretion of ideas that were influenced by the very few individuals who shaped his perception of society. Honan has much to say of these who include Arnold's father, Dr. Thomas Arnold; his wife, Fanny Wightman; the mysterious "Marguerite" of the Switzerland poems; and a protracted hot and cold male bonding relationship with Arthur Clough. Arnold's popularity with his reading public was not very high, at least during his early career. Honan skillfully portrays a man who is at distinct odds with his predecessors and contemporaries. It is easy to see why a public, spoiled on the humanistic and optimistic Romantic spirit, would have much trouble warming up to a writer who forced the Victorians from their smug sense of complacency. And it is this preoccupation of Arnold, his insistence on "wandering between two worlds," that stamps him as one of the most atypical thinkers of the day. Honan indicates that it was not enough for Arnold to be merely different from the classicism of Tennyson or the unbridled optimism of Browning. Rather Arnold saw his life in stages--the subdued melancholy of "Alaric at Rome" was to deepen into an all consuming world weariness that was to encompass "Empedocles on Etna." It would be too glib, implies Honan, to insinuate that The Sorrows of Young Arnold sprang full blown from nowhere. Honan's early chapters chronicle the training in classics that the child Arnold was expected to master. And master them he did. Arnold was writing poetry in Latin at an age in which other boys barely knew the rudiments of English. Behind this forced fed education lay the impetus that put Arnold on a track from he could never quite get derailed: the imposing presence of his father. Trilling and Honan are not the only ones who have wondered just how far Thomas Arnold's influence pervades the canon of his son's thoughts. It is difficult not to read autobiography into the death of Sohrab at the hands of his father Rustum. Honan seems determined to show that the relationship of the father to the son's writings is not a mere casual link--rather he posits it as one of the central links. Possibly the most interesting part of the book is Honan's appraisal of Arnold's oft overloo